Project O presents a recent video artwork considering Somerset House’s historical connection to the British Royal Navy. For eighty years from the end of the eighteenth century the Navy’s administrative offices occupied the building, a time when its activities were instrumental in the securing and ruling of an empire. In this new commission by Somerset House Studios, the first in a series of commissioned works exploring the subject, Project O asks questions of choice, inevitability, movement, defiance and surrender that arise in relation to thoughts about water - the waves will always rule us. The Navy Board, the administrative function of the Royal Navy was based in South Wing through most of the 19th century, helping secure one the largest empires the world has ever seen. In this period, the Navy played a significant (and contentious) role in the abolition of the slave trade. Until the Embankment was built, Somerset House was accessible directly by boat for naval personnel through what is now the Embankment arch. New Wing was an extension and remodelling by James Pennethorne of Admiralty residences, completed in 1856.

the waves will always rule us

tides

Moon

internal landscapes

desires for validation via dominion over that which is us

be it land, sea, the bodies of others

states of precarity

Unravelling

we occupy honour mourn the gaps

we stand centre-screen

body as portal-passage

we stand centre-screen

we occupy honour mourn the gaps

Unravelling

states of precarity

internal landscapes

be it land, sea, the bodies of others

desires for validation via dominion over that which is us

Moon

tides

the waves will always rule us

body

the gaps

Unravelling

states of precarity - internal landscapes

the waves will always rule us

Project O, Saved (2018)
Concept, choreography and performance by Project O (Alexandrina Hemsley & Jamila Johnson-Small). Camera by Katarzyna Perlak. Animation by Jack Barraclough. Sound by Verity Susman. Commissioned by Somerset House Studios, 2018

Project O (the collaborative supernova between Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small) make work that aims to continually address, reevaluate, intervene, comment upon, resist and celebrate the fallout from being born black, mixed and female in 21st Century UK. As a starting point they shift as they look, converse and interrogate what they see and feel. Their work is driven by our engagement with dance practices but the creative outcome includes works ranging from shows for theatres to performance lectures, free schools and DJ sets. Project O experiment with alternative ways their bodies can be present and visible (on stage or off), and ways that they can be present and visible in our bodies for ourselves. One of their compositional enquiries is around inviting audiences to consider their own shifting positions and identities - an attempt to acknowledge that all are complicit in these systems of oppression.

This programme took place within Theaster Gates’s installation Black Image Corporation presented by Prada, The Vinyl Factory, and The Showroom. Collective Intimacy was inspired by Gates’s ethos of collaboration and The Showroom’s commitment to togetherness and communal knowledge, taking on multiple trans-located narratives of the current Black experience as a point of departure for a cosmopolitan worldview. In response to Gates’s reactivated spaces in Chicago and how his socially engaged projects enable communities to connect and grow, Collective Intimacy aimed to create a new space for people to gather, listen, converse, and contemplate amongst a fusion of art, design, music, and everyday life.

Within both 180 The Strand and The Showroom, Collective Intimacy hosted interdisciplinary interventions by artists, musicians, designers, writers, thinkers, collectives and members of the public, who are all invited to distort notions of selfhood and togetherness in the spirit of creating a global community.